Talk:Nightmares
My whole life, my dreams have always been incredibly vivid, for better or for worse. My earliest memory is a nightmare I had as a child, about two or three years old. My family and I were staying with my grandparents for a few nights, as was the case in the dream. It started out with me just chatting to my soft toys, who could talk, so I know that I spent a good while at first just talking. Then, slowly, I started feeling like something was wrong. My hairs were standing on end, my skin felt clammy, and I got an intense feeling similar to when you know someone is staring at you. All at once, the toys went silent, and one of them quietly said "he's here". The first thing I heard was footsteps, followed by the sound of gas escaping a can. My room was the end of the hallway, past everyone else's, and I could hear someone stop in front of the first door, where my parents and younger brother were asleep. I heard the gas again, and after a seconds delay I heard my mother start to scream. Not in fright, but the scream of absolute agony. I felt the heat first, followed by the smell of smoke, and then of burning flesh. The screaming continued as the person moved on to the next doorway, and my grandparents got the same treatment. By this point, I was in tears, trying to stay quiet in case the stranger heard me, the toys completely silent as well. I heard footsteps drawing closer, and a large man slowly came into view through the open doorway, and raised what I for years called the "opposite of a fire extinguisher", which I realised was a flamethrower many years later. Before I woke, the man raised the flamethrower and set fire to the room, and all I could see was white and red, the toys screaming next to me as I burned, and I can still, to this day, vividly remember what it felt like to burn alive, listening to the dying screams of my family. Just last year, I had a dream where my younger brother and I were exploring a mansion, only for one of us to trigger a trap that sent a giant boulder flying down to crush my brother, waking up only to bolt for the bathroom because I could still feel the warm, wet sensation of his blood on my skin. When I'm having dreams about riding armored unicorns through forest landscapes, wielding a giant sword, along with other pleasant subjects, the hyperreality of my dreams is nice. (Especially the pleasant dreams that started turning up once I was old enough). When it's nightmares, however, it can take me days to come right. Death is only the surface of the nightmares, as well. There was a solid year when I was a teenager when I dreamt of being raped at least once a month. Last year, I continually dreamt of wandering the exact same house, one I've never seen before but was exactly the same in every dream, trying to evade a ghost who followed me around trying to kill me. One night, it caught me, and when it possessed me I couldn't breathe, like my head was being held underwater. I woke up hyperventilating, trying to draw air into my lungs instead of pseudo-water. When I was seven, I somehow managed to teach myself how to lucid dream so that I could always wake myself up once I started having a nightmare, but when I failed to have nightmares for five or six years as a result, I forgot how to do it. Luckily, I've been having less nightmares now that I'm older, but when I do have them, it can be really fucking hard to sleep for a while afterwards. Whoever says that dreams aren't scary can kiss my fucking arse.